Back in September Yahoo launched a new Yahoo Screen iOS app, a TV remote-like experience for browsing content from Yahoo and sending content to your TV via AirPlay. Today the company announced that it is launching the Yahoo Screen experience directly on the Apple TV.

Yahoo Screen on Apple TV helps you quickly find all the great video Yahoo has to offer —Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, live news and events, music and original Yahoo programs — so you can enjoy on your big screen.

The app appears to be a similar experience as the iOS app, allowing users to browse through content hosted on Yahoo across categories such as news, sports, food and entertainment and instantly stream content to their TV. Yahoo! has made new deals with Viacom that will bring content from Comedy Central and elsewhere, and it will also live stream original Yahoo programs, news, and live events. A few of the shows already available on Yahoo Screen include Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. You’ll also find content from MLB, UFC, The Onion, ABC News, Martha Stewart, and more.

The apps are being pushed out over the air to the Apple TV in the U.S. now, and we’ve also discovered that a new PBS channel has arrived today (pictured above). The app doesn’t require users to have a TV subscription to access content, but it does require users to sign in using Google+, Facebook, or the app’s registration in order to access PBS broadcasts for their location. The app doesn’t have live content, but it does have many of the network’s new shows shortly after they’ve aired.

About the Author

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s weekly Logic Pros series and makes music as one half of Toronto-based Makamachine.

It’s not a question of what Apple wants. None of the content mentioned in the article is available to view online if you’re outside of the US unless it’s through a licensed distributer. Licences are bought by broadcasters outside of the US for rights for those specific shows in their jurisdiction. So Yahoo may have online streaming broadcast rights for SNL, Colbert, etc in the US but not for other countries. Hopefully Apple can pull some strings with the content owners and make cross-licensing a bit easier though?

Yes, turn them off using parental controls and have to enter a pin every time you do anything!

No, my iPhone is a joy to use as I touch the icon I want in a beautiful touch interface; I don’t have to navigate over every icon – up, down, left, right to highlight the one I want (with a blue highlight which is impossible to see around the movies icon). Half a dozen clicks to select an item.

Then there’s the nightmare of backwards/forwards in Netflix and TV shows, navigating multiple layers of menus just to restart the device…

Incomplete slowly scrolling item titles in movies and tv shows, difficult to read text for the elderly and little or no accessibility. It’s not good, and there’s no need for it, there is loads of space on the screen, it’s just used very poorly,

Yes, it is a complex experience with options confused… Not least the parental controls to hide/show icons (wtf?!).

The new releases row has gone from movies, so unless a movie is popular on release, you can easily see what is released each Monday.

This is not the apple way, it is not beautiful, not simple and doesn’t ‘just work’.

I love my Apple TV (four of them currently) but this is in spite of an ugly, confused, counter-intuitive interface,

This random assortment of apps is incredibly clunky and counter intuitive now. AppleTV is desperately in need of a global search that allows you search deep within every App, and present as Content to Watch in the search results, with Cover art, short name, and brief description, as well as the corresponding App it will launch.

I live in New Zealand and we don’t even have Netflix here, and Apple doesn’t sell TV shows in the NZ iTunes Store, so you can imagine how useful it is when you set the location to New Zealand. But… there are services out there that can get around geo-blocking. I have mine set to the US and despite not being there I enjoy Netflix, Hulu Plus, Vevo, and now PBS etc. Yes it sucks that Apple only seems to be focussing on its home turf with Apple TV, but you can join in the fun if you know how.

That’s fine if you want to watch US content, and don’t mind breaking the law. Personally I’m much more interested in watching UK content. In the UK access to the BBC iPlayer is so standard now it’s on every device, it’s completely ubiquitous. It should be unthinkable to release a streaming device in the UK without it, and yet, Apple did. It’s bizarre, truly bizarre.

The biggest movie service here is Amazon LoveFilm, and that’s absent too. While we have Netflix here it’s a minor player and focussed heavily on archive TV content. I think Amazon is absent even from US ATVs though, so there could be some politics at play there.